WHILE THE BIG Leaguers muse over digital cameras and Internet access,
desktop publishing remains a relatively new transition for some smaller
weeklies.

At the top of the list of obstacles is the significant cost of entry:
equipment, consultants and training for smaller companies are
disproportionately more expensive, because of inherent disparities in
the price of these commodities.

Smaller staffs also mean fewer people to produce a paper on deadline.
There are few if any, back-ups. When one designer boots up a Mac, the
whole staff knows it.

The Long Island Advance, Patchogue, N.Y.; Anton Publications,
Mineola, N.Y., and the South Shore Record, Woodmere, N.Y., represent
different stages of growth, frustration and survival skills in the face
of a rapidly digitizing industry. What they do share is a commitment to
publishing their papers on the desktop . . . eventually.

From a cost standpoint, representatives of all three weeklies agree
that desktop publishing provides attractive incentives, including
reduced manhours, more design flexibility at deadline, and decreased or
eliminated darkroom and chemical use.

In addition, they cite the potential for higher productivity
resulting from electronic file transfer capabilities, which allow
employees to work virtually anytime; anywhere.

John T. Tuthill III's grandfather purchased the Advance in 1892,
and today it, along with sister papers the Suffolk County News and the
Islip Bulletin, have a weekly circulation of 18,000.

Before implementing desktop publishing, the Advance used what Tuthill
calls an "army of paste-up artists" and a Varityper
typesetting machine. After. desktop equipment arrived in April 1992,
Tuthill said, "It took almost a year to gain complete expertise and
overcome the errors."

However, the Advance could claim 100% electronic prepress by
September 1992, exactly 100 years after Tuthill's grandfather,
James Canfield, purchased the publication.

The Advance does its production on Macintosh Quadra 800s, 650s and
610s. An Apple Laserwriter Pro 630 printer is used for proofing, and two
11"xl7" printers, a 600-dpi QMS 860 and a 1200-dpi Xante
Accel-a-writer 8200, handle camera-ready output. Today all photos and
artwork are scanned, on either an Agfa Arcus flatbed scanner, or a
Hewlett-Packard Scanjet 2CX.

In the classified department, data is entered on Hewlett-Packard 486
PCs and then physically transferred to the production room on a disk,
where the typesetting manager loads it into one of the 650s.

The Advance's artists use Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator
products. Writers and editors use Microsoft Word and QuarkXPress. Once
the typography is done, artwork is added to the QuarkXPress pages, which
are output on either the QMS or the Xante.

Tuthill was true to his intention for a thorough transition, and so
came full circle to the work environment of the Advance's
production room. Ergonomic chairs reduce back problems, and indirect
lighting is used to cut down glare on the monitors.

In addition, Tuthill said, "The counters were all custom-made,
using the correct height for less stress on the wrist."

Tuthill hired a Bayport, New York-based consultant, Roger Thurber, to
lead the transition to desktop at the papers' downtown Patchogue
facilities. After spending three days assessing a newspaper's
needs, Thurber's company, Publishing, Arts, produces a hardware/
software solution in the form of a "shopping list."

The publication gets bids on equipment, and Publishing Arts then
advises them on purchase.

When the equipment is delivered, Publishing Arts manages
installation, system integration and staff training. The company also
provides remote access support, which the Advance utilizes on occasion.

At the brink of full desktop prepress is Anton Publications. Karl V.
Anton Jr. is the publisher of Anton's 18 weeklies, which have a
combined circulation of 70,000.

Anton began the transition to desktop publishing in 1990, and today
all type is set on the desktop. The holdout at Anton is the art
department, which has yet to "go desktop." Anton anticipates
that the art department will be converted to electronics by May, when it
has finished training.

For Anton, the benefits come through loud and clear: "Desktop
publishing [gives us] excellent layout ability. The flexibility is
tremendous, such as the capability of taking one article and putting it
into another paper."

Anton added that in production, the company "needed twice as
many people before we started using desktop publishing. There's no
question about it; desktop publishing is the way to go. It's done
with such ease; I'm constantly amazed."

The art department, which will use Illustrator and Photoshop on the
software side, is home to five Power Macintosh 7100s, a 1600-dpi Umax
flatbed scanner for photos, and a 600-dpi Hewlett-Packard flatbed
scanner for line art.

Editorial enters text on PCs and lays it out in QuarkXPress, using
Macintosh IIs and fxs. For now, typesetters leave space for the art
department to paste up photos. Camera-ready text output is done on two
600-dpi QMS 11"xl7" printers, and camera-ready art is output
on a 1200-dpi Unity 11"xl7" printer. Printing is done
in-house.

Anton attributes much of his confidence in the company's
transition to typographer and system engineer Tom Baade, who joined
Anton when the company acquired a Port Jefferson weekly five years ago
and remained with the company despite the demise of the newly purchased
weekly.

Says Anton, "Tom does all the consulting - you need someone like
him to keep up on the technology. He is absolutely indispensable."

In the initial stages of desktop publishing is the South Shore
Record, where Jerry Schwartzberg is vice president of the
15,000-circulation paper.

Schwartzberg says the Record has not made the transition to desktop
publishing because he is not confident in the state of the current
technology.

"When do you make the switch?" Schwartzberg asks, adding
that you could "spend $75,000 on equipment today and risk having
obsolete equipment" in the near future.

Some basics are in place: Aldus Pagemaker on Macintosh IIs is used
for typography, layout and design. Camera-ready printing is done on a
300-dpi Apple Laserwriter Plus. The art department then cuts and pastes
both the type and art as camera-ready mechanicals to be sent out for
printing.

To the extent that Anton is confident, Schwartzberg is insecure.

About consultants, he says, "Where will they be tomorrow?"
Schwartzberg wants the backing of a large company to reassure him.

"I am very impressed with Quark's publishing system,"
he says. "But if you are in trouble, they are not structured for
the kind of help I want. I need people in the building not telephone
support."

Both Anton and Tuthill admit to evidently surmountable difficulties:
"One of the hardest things is keeping up with the technological
improvements," said Anton, who relies on Baade to conduct relevant
research.

Tuthill zeroed in on a single technical issue, his network
communications: "The state of the Ethernet is still very basic. It
is very slow sending pages this way, especially pages with scans. I
can't wait for wireless communication between the workstations and
the printers."

For representatives of both the Advance and Anton, however,
difficulties more likely hinged on the personnel element, rather than
technical snafus.

Said the Advance's Molloy, "The transition was rough. The
staff did not have a computer background."

However, because the Advance staff embraced the change, they remained
encouraged throughout the process. Molloy credits Tuthill with
maintaining a positive perspective: "As soon as he saw what desktop
is capable of, he went great guns. He really puts a lot of trust and
faith in the staff."

At the Advance, desktop publishing was phased in by section, and then
by paper.

"The staff is better motivated; the work is more exciting",
Molloy said. "They like to use the sounds on the Macs to break up
the tension around deadline."

Anton agrees: "The staff adapted to it well; they were very
enthusiastic about the computers."

In contrast, Anton cited personal knowledge of another weekly where
the staff was unhappy about the transition to desktop publishing. As a
result, the publisher is postponing the transition until he overcomes
this obstacle.

At the other end of the spectrum are papers like Anton's and the
Advance. The latter is truly living up to its name.

According to Molloy, the paper is looking at direct digital capture,
as well as online services that could have them posting local, regional
and world news twice a day, and potentially competing with dailies.

"We were the primary news source when James Canfield bought the
paper in 1892," he says, "and we can become that again.
It's just a race to see who's going to grab the technology
first."

COPYRIGHT 1995 Duncan McIntosh Company, Inc.
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.